Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

Of course lowered expectations. I mean, Splatoon came out on the least successful Nintendo hardware ever. The fact that it's outselling Super Mario 3D World in Japan (and likely the same in the United States), and it's generating some buzz should be considered good enough to keep the franchise alive; in Japan, Splatoon amiibo sold really well, and it seems stock is still problem, which signals an on-going interest for the game. Also: let's be honest, Splatoon is not a high-budget game that needs 5 million to break-even (well, probably no Nintendo games need that); it did have an AA promotion, but the game itself doesn't seem it took a huge effort in developing; this was basically confirmed by the recent Iwata Asks.

The most important thing, here, is the fact that Splatoon signals Nintendo's ability of creating unique and moderately successful IPs even in a market where it's becoming less and less relevant.

Also: what comparable IPs were shut down for selling only 2-3m worldwide?

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

El Capitan Todd

Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

Nintendo should cancel every game from now on, due to Wii U sw sales.
Honestly, I don't think that Nintendo will cancel Splatoon if it will sell 1mil WW, but the contrary: they will see it as a potentially important new IP

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

Big company does not mean big budget, and to be honest comparing any Nintendo developed game to the kind of EA/Ubisoft bloated monstrosities which fail to meet expectations despite 2-3 million sales is... well it's not a very good comparison at all.

The Birthday Skeleton

Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

It doesn't look like Splatoon had a very big development budget, it has been in development for what? 2 years? 6 months out of that there were 3-4 guys working on the prototype? Maybe the marketing costs were higher than a normal Nintendo game, but 2 mio. sales plus amiibo should make it profitable.

Cancelled franchises because sales of 2-3 million worldwide are usually big production from companies with lots of employees working on one game.

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

If all DLC came tied to $13 figurines, I'd consider all DLC to be free

Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

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Splatoon strikes me as the kind of game that'll keep selling in the long run. I could see it doing 3m+ WW which would be a great result for Nintendo. I could be wrong, though. I'm pleasantly surprised it has resonated with the Japanese audience though...I expected bomba.

Pikmin 1 became a hit also thanks to a song that was playing during advertisements. We cannot know how much it was advertised, BUT I remember Nintendo using Pikmin as an example of what GC could do, and it was pretty pushed by magazines at the time.

Mrgrgr

For Splatoon I feel a million is fine since the goal here is just to establish the franchise and have it sell notably larger numbers on a platform that isn't the biggest disaster since the Dreamcast.

That would be my assessment of the vast majority of Wii U games in general. Profitability is presumably very secondary at this point since we're talking about a new EOL platform that's a burning wreckage, so the goal is to salvage what you can build something out of the functional parts.

That said I wouldn't be surprised if Splatoon made money. The vast majority of the costs there is presumably advertising, so it depends how much they spent on that.

Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

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That 1 million plus sold in Japan for the original PAD 3DS seems to be the only franchise expansion success PAD has had. The arcade games don't seem to be performing well, people don't seem super interested in the mobile mode expansions, and now even Super Mario can't make it sell again on 3DS.

That 1 million plus sold in Japan for the original PAD 3DS seems to be the only franchise expansion success PAD has had. The arcade games don't seem to be performing well, people don't seem super interested in the mobile mode expansions, and now even Super Mario can't make it sell again on 3DS.

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Lowered expectations ftw? For a big company like Nintendo, merely having a million seller worldwide is pretty pathetic honestly. Publishers have cancelled franchises which "only" sell 2-3 million worldwide.

XP-39C²

Splatoon is pullig bigger numbers. About 23k software sales outside of Splatoon for WiiU. I think the WiiU usually lies around that number when new releases arent happening. The numbers for the other platforms also seems fairly normal, no big fluxuation one way or the other i think.

I think first party platform holders are obviously more lenient about continuing franchises. I was just commenting on how people are celebrating this like it's a huge success. It's not. The game is doing well given the circumstances, but if this is the greatest success of the year for Nintendo, then it's a pretty shitty year!